Why Your Leadership Blind Spot Isn’t What You Think It Is
I've spent over 25 years working with leaders and teams across global organizations.
And I've noticed something that no leadership framework I've encountered fully explains.
The leaders who struggle the most, do not necessarily lack skill. They are the ones who cannot see their own pattern.
I’ve spent over 25 years working with leaders and teams across global organizations.
And I’ve noticed something that no leadership framework I’ve encountered fully explains.
The leaders who struggle the most, do not necessarily lack skill. They are the ones who cannot see their own pattern.
The Problem With How We Currently Think About Leadership
Most leadership development starts with a gap analysis.
- You assess someone against some competency framework.
- You find the gaps.
- You design a learning journey to close them.
And underneath all of this is a straightforward assumption: leaders underperform because they are missing something – some skill, some capability.
But in my experience, the most consequential leadership problems are not about what’s missing.
They are about what’s present – and not yet noticed, not yet examined.
There are leaders who dominate every conversation, not because they don’t know how to listen, but being the most informed person in the room drives their sense of safety, sense of being relevant.
There are leaders who avoid difficult decisions, not because they lack analytical capability, but being liked rather than being right determines their self-worth.
There are leaders who drive relentlessly toward results, not because they don’t understand people, but because stillness feels like failure to them.
None of these can be termed as skill gaps or missing capabilities. They are patterns – deeply conditioned ways of seeing, responding to, and relating with everything: how decisions get made, how teams experience their leader and how organizations move or stall.
And the reason these patterns are so difficult to address is that they are not visible to the person living inside them.
An Ancient Framework That Sees What Modern Tools Miss
A few years ago, I found myself often going back to a framework, a concept I had encountered much earlier in life but never seriously thought about it as a professional tool.
The Vedic philosophy of Triguna.
In Sanskrit, guna means quality or tendency. The Triguna framework proposes that all behaviour – individual and collective – is shaped by three fundamental tendencies operating in different proportions, at any given moment, in any given situation:
Sattva: the quality of wisdom, clarity, discernment and balance. A person tending towards Sattva brings steadiness, ethical judgment, and the capacity to see situations as they are rather than as they wish them to be.
Rajas: the quality of activity, drive, ambition, and restlessness. A person tending towards Rajas brings energy, initiative, and momentum – but also the risk of leading to greed and selfishness, and confusing movement with progress and achievement with worth.
Tamas: the quality of inertia, resistance, ignorance and heaviness. In its most useful form, Tamas provides stillness and stability. When it becomes dominant, it shows up as avoidance, rigidity, and the inability to initiate change.
Every person – and every leader – carries all three. What varies is the proportion, and which tendency dominates in which context.
And no, this framework does not categorize people. It rather describes dynamics – the inner forces that drive outer behaviour. And it does this with a precision that is quietly confronting, creating the right visibility in the best possible way.
This is the foundation of SaRaThi – a structured path from self- and systemic-awareness, through realignment, to transformation.
What the Pattern Actually Looks Like
Let me give you a composite example – drawn from patterns I’ve seen repeatedly, not from any single individual.
A senior leader. Technically excellent. Highly regarded. Begins a new role with a mandate to transform how their function operates.
Their inner pattern (self-belief) is strongly aligned with Sattva – valuing clarity, ethical decisions, always looking at a larger perspective. This has served them well for a couple of decades and helped them handle different situations amicably.
Their leadership style, however, leans towards a blend of Sattva and Rajas – combining wisdom and ambition, balancing thoughtful direction with strong execution energy. People trust them. They create psychological safety and a sense of competition together.
So far, this sounds like a capable leader. And they are.
But here is where it gets interesting, and concerning.
Their and their team’s perception of the ecosystem i.e. the organization – its culture, its willingness to change, its leadership at the levels above – is heavily dominated by a mix of Rajas and Tamas. Resistant yet urgent. Stuck yet trying to achieve more. Fatigued by previous change initiatives that went nowhere, yet embarking on another transformation program.
What happens when an inner drive aligned with Sattva meets a leadership style having a combination of Sattva and Rajas in an ecosystem having a blend of Rajas and Tamas?
The leader works to inspire. The ecosystem forces activity with heaviness. The team gets confused and fatigued.
The leader interprets the lack of results as a team problem – not enough goal clarity, not enough commitment. They begin to apply more pressure. The Satvik steadiness in their belief starts to erode. The team, already fatigued, reads the increased pressure not as necessary urgency but as a loss of the psychological safety they valued.
Trust quietly degrades. Performance doesn’t improve. The leader becomes increasingly frustrated and increasingly alone.
None of this happened because of a skill deficit. It happened because of a pattern the leader couldn’t see – and because the ecosystem was influencing the situation in ways nobody had identified, nobody had mapped.
Why This Matters More Now Than Ever
Today, we are in a world where the complexity leaders face has genuinely left behind the frameworks most organizations use to develop them.
The environments are more ambiguous. The generational dynamics within teams are more divergent. The pace of change makes it harder to rely on experience as a guide, because the context changes faster than what experience can absorb.
In this environment, self-awareness is not a soft skill. It is the foundational leadership capability.
Not self-awareness in the general sense of knowing your strengths and development areas. But the specific, honest capacity to see your own patterns – what drives you, what protects you, what you reach for automatically when under pressure – and to make conscious choices about whether those patterns are serving the situation you’re actually in.
This is what the Triguna framework offers. Not a new set of behaviors to change and actions to perform. A clearer view of the tendencies already operating – so that conscious leadership becomes possible where automatic pattern was operating before.
A Question Worth Sitting With
Before I close, I want to leave you with something that I often use at the beginning of a coaching engagement.
Think about the last time you felt genuinely effective as a leader. Not just productive – but effective in the way that felt aligned, grounded, and right.
Now think about the last time leadership felt as if you are exerting a lot of effort in a not-so-positive way. Not the healthy difficulty of a hard problem – but the energy-sapping friction of something not working, without a clear reason why.
In my experience, the gap between those two states is rarely explained by external circumstances.
It is almost always a pattern story.
The question is: have you recognized what’s your pattern actually doing?
The question is: have you recognized what’s your pattern actually doing?
If this article has raised a question you’d like to answer about yourself, the SRT Insights – Leader Snapshot Assessment takes 10 minutes and provides an initial snapshot. What it surfaces tends to stay with you considerably longer.
I’d be glad to hear what the framework brings up for you – in the comments or in a direct conversation.
